Taylor, week 4
Origins and Context of Occupy Wall Street
On a warm September morning in , an activist mobilization convened in Manhattan's Financial District under the call to "occupy Wall Street."
The mobilization occurred amidst an explosive year of global social unrest:
The Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.
The Movement of the Squares throughout Europe.
Domestic protests earlier in in the United States, including the multi-week occupation of Wisconsin's Capitol by citizens, accompanied by demonstrations drawing upward of people protesting state budget cuts and legislative attacks on labor unions.
Catalyzing economic background of the financial crisis:
In the three years following the crash, the primary social movement gaining national prominence in the United States was the right-wing Tea Party.
The Tea Party advanced a victim-blaming narrative attributing the nation's financial distress to African American mortgage holders rather than systemic fraud committed by predatory lenders.
In contrast to nations like Iceland, where culpable financial executives were prosecuted and sentenced to prison, the American banking sector received a multitrillion-dollar taxpayer bailout, allowing Wall Street executives to extract massive bonuses while millions of citizens suffered job losses, a severe recession, and an unprecedented wave of home foreclosures.
Ideological impact and core diagnostic slogans:
The emergence of Occupy Wall Street punctured political apathy by asserting that the rule of the people is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of the rich.
The movement repopularized class consciousness through the defining slogan "We are the "1\%."\n * The diagnosis posited that unfettered capitalism and authentic democracy are structurally at odds rather than inseparable allies.\n * Encampments proliferated across thousands of American cities and towns, populated by participants from diverse backgrounds seeking an authentic, substantive "real democracy."\n\n* International resonance of the demand for "real democracy":\n * Reunited anti-authoritarian rebels in Egypt's Tahrir Square and Bahrain.\n * Mobilized student activists during the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong.\n * Inspired demonstrators at Turkey's Taksim Gezi Park.\n * Engaged citizens residing in European and North American nations ostensibly characterized as advanced liberal democracies.\n\n# The Mechanics, Ideals, and Collapse of Consensus Decision-Making\n\n* Ideological definition of consensus democracy:\n * A core faction of anarchist organizers defined "real democracy" as governance through complete, non-delegated consensus, eliminating representative intermediaries in favor of direct, universal participation aimed at unanimity.\n * The New York City General Assembly primer defined the process: "Consensus is a creative thinking process: When we vote, we decide between two alternatives. With consensus, we take an issue, hear the range of enthusiasm, ideas and concerns about it, and synthesize a proposal that best serves everybody's vision."\n\n* Organizational structures within Zuccotti Park:\n * The encampment functioned as a postmodern, tech-savvy reimagining of the ancient Athenian agora.\n * Deliberation was split between spontaneous topical discussion circles (debating economics and philosophy) and formal working groups tasked with logistical operations, including food provisioning, laundry, sanitation, and media relations.\n * A volunteer-run library operated on site as an international symbol of the movement, embodying the principle that democratic participation demands ongoing intellectual reflection coupled with direct action.\n * Large General Assemblies utilized the "human microphone" (the choral repetition of a speaker's words by surrounding crowds) to circumvent municipal bans on sound amplification equipment.\n\n* Structural flaws and breakdown of the assembly process:\n * Occupy established a framework of "modified consensus" requiring a fallback threshold of a \frac{2}{3} majority vote to prevent unilateral vetoes, yet the system proved practically unworkable.\n * Procedural friction surfaced early over behavioral disputes, such as the continuous Zuccotti Park drum circle:\n * A majority sought to restrict relentless drumming hours, while persistent musicians asserted their playing constituted the "heartbeat of the movement."\n * Dissenting participants openly rejected the claim, shouting, "Don't call yourself my heartbeat!", while observers displayed signs reading, "I Care About Democracy More Than I Hate This Drum Circle."\n * The temporal demands of open-ended evening assemblies privileged individuals with discretionary free time, systematically excluding individuals constrained by standard work shifts or family caretaking duties.\n * The absence of formal membership requirements uncoupled rights from responsibilities, permitting transient visitors to endorse or block proposals they had no duty to implement.\n * The veto mechanism empowered bad-faith actors and entrenched minorities to paralyze deliberations; as seasonal cold weather reduced attendance heading toward mid-November 2011, small, unyielding factions obstructed basic organizational measures, converting consensus into the tyranny of an unaccountable minority.\n * Escalating procedural paralysis deteriorated into internal acrimony, culminating in physical confrontations and fistfights among organizers after the park's physical clearance by law enforcement.\n\n# Democratic Dispossession, Oligarchy, and Institutional Overreaction\n\n* Systemic conditions driving popular alienation:\n * Contemporary liberal democratic structures limit public civic agency to casting a ballot every 24 years.\n * Everyday citizens endure acute structural dispossession across workplaces, educational institutions, and civic life, exacerbated by student debt, healthcare expenses, predatory debt, and ecological crisis.\n * Empirical political science and economic literature confirm that ordinary citizens exert virtually zero statistical influence on public policy compared to wealthy elites and corporate entities.\n * In 2015, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter diagnosed the American political system as having devolved into an "oligarchy" ruled by an elite few.\n\n* The reactive extremes of prefigurative activism:\n * Disgust with money-dominated, celebrity-driven electoral spectacles prompted activists to discard political representation entirely.\n * Backlash against the Supreme Court's 2010 *Citizens United* ruling—which treated political campaign expenditures as protected speech—led assemblies to reject all structural curbs on assembly power.\n * Rejection of entrenched socioeconomic stratifications fostered an uncompromising egalitarianism that proved logistically unviable.\n * Hostility toward official state secrecy produced a norm of radical transparency, where internal disputes and sensitive organizing meetings were live-streamed and broadcast publicly.\n * Activists rejected majoritarian rule (where a 51\%49\% minority) and treated absolute consensus as the non-negotiable cornerstone of a new social order.\n\n* Institutional usage of consensus in mainstream bodies:\n * Contrary to assumptions that consensus is solely an anarchist or countercultural tool, international governing bodies deploy identical rationales.\n * The United Nations General Assembly officially justifies consensus procedures over majoritarian voting:\n * "When you adopt resolutions by a vote, you only need to get a simple majority to agree on the text of a resolution. You don't need to care about or try to understand the perspectives of the minority who disagree. This process is divisive. When you adopt resolutions by consensus, you have to be concerned about the viewpoint of everyone and engage in negotiations that often result in compromises so that different points of view are taken into consideration. This process is inclusive."\n * Voting is officially characterized by the UN as a "way of operating stuck in the past."\n * Because UN General Assembly resolutions carry recommendatory rather than legally binding status, consensus is viewed as pragmatic, ensuring the widest voluntary compliance among sovereign member states.\n\n# Jane Mansbridge on Adversary Versus Unitary Democracy\n\n* Theoretical framework from *Beyond Adversary Democracy* (1980):\n * Political scientist Jane Mansbridge investigated the operational failures of 1960s and 1970s New Left collectives and rural New England town meetings that championed participatory democracy.\n * Mansbridge identified two distinct, coexisting democratic models that must be recognized and balanced within any polity:\n * **Adversary Democracy:** Premised on inherently conflicting interests among participants. Operates via majoritarian decision-making, secret ballots, competitive elections, and winner-take-all outcomes.\n * **Unitary Democracy:** Premised on shared, common interests. Operates through face-to-face deliberation, equal respect, and efforts to forge consensus.\n\n* Dynamic tensions and structural limits of unitary democracy:\n * When personal and political interests generally align, unitary institutions build social cohesion and mutual sympathy.\n * When underlying interests irreconcilably diverge, imposing a unitary framework intensifies bitterness and interpersonal conflict: "If there is no solution that is in everyone's interest, more debate will not usually produce agreement."\n * The fatal breakdown of unitary democratic experiments stems directly from an ideological refusal to acknowledge genuine conflicts of interest, or a refusal to resolve persistent conflicts via structured adversarial mechanisms.\n\n# The American Founding: Factions, Class Interests, and Constitutional Consensus\n\n* The intellectual fear of faction:\n * French theorist Marcel Gauchet observed: "Democratic society, at its most profound, is one of conflict, but one in which there is no one who does not dream of social unity (however they may conceive of it)."\n * Historian Richard Hofstadter noted that eighteenth-century political architects viewed factional divisions as pathology, believing society should naturally enjoy concord and near-unanimous consensus; organized political parties were condemned as "sores upon the body politic."\n * John Adams explicitly warned that "the division of the republic into two great parties... is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."\n\n* James Madison's thesis in *Federalist no. 10*:\n * Writing as Publius, Madison located the origins of social conflict in the innate nature and liberty of humankind:\n * "A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts."\n * Eliminating liberty to destroy factions would reproduce tyrannical despotism; therefore, government must design institutions to control factional effects.\n * Alexander Hamilton asserted in 1788: "We are attempting by this Constitution... to abolish factions and to unite all parties for the general welfare."\n * Madisonian theory relies on pluralistic proliferation to prevent unified majority tyranny, echoing Voltaire's reflection in *Lettres philosophiques*: "If there were only one religion in England, one would have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other's throats; but they have thirty and they live happy and in peace."\n * The constitutional design aimed for an ordered balance, capturing Alexander Pope's poetic formulation:\n * "Not chaos-like, together crushed and bruised / But, as the world, harmoniously confused: / Where order in variety we see, / And where, though all things differ, all agree."\n\n* The evolution of legitimate opposition:\n * In *The Idea of a Party System*, Hofstadter outlined the shift from early partisan attempts at total mutual annihilation to a framework of "legitimate opposition."\n * Competitors submit to a overarching "constitutional consensus":\n * "It is understood, on one side, that opposition is directed against a certain policy or complex of policies, not against the legitimacy of the constitutional regime itself... Opposition rises above naked contestation; it forswears sedition, treason, conspiracy, coup d'état, riot, and assassination, and makes an open public appeal for the support of a more or less free electorate. Government, in return, is constrained by certain limitations as to the methods it can use to counter the opposition."\n\n* Madisonian defense of propertied minority rights:\n * Madison explicitly pinpointed unequal property distribution as the fundamental driver of political factions:\n * "The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."\n * Madison argued that unequal property ownership stems directly from diverse human faculties, which governments exist primarily to protect:\n * "The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties."\n * Constitutional design intentionally blunted majoritarian democracy to prevent lower economic strata from enacting wealth redistribution, debt cancellation, or paper money initiatives, which Madison labeled "improper or wicked" projects.\n * Madison summarized the fundamental purpose of state governance: "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."\n * Historical reality: The framing founders were wealthy, landowning, slaveholding elites protecting economic privilege (e.g., George Washington held massive estates and engaged in speculative land acquisitions on unceded Indigenous territories).\n\n# The Duopoly and Institutional Voter Suppression\n\n* Collusive bipartisan consensus:\n * The Democratic and Republican parties function as private, entrenched entities rather than neutral public infrastructure, acting collusively to protect their shared institutional monopoly.\n * Structural mechanisms enacted by the duopoly include closed primary systems, onerous ballot-access thresholds for independent or third-party candidates, partisan control over national debate stages, and bilateral legislative gerrymandering.\n * United Nations Development Program Director of Democratic Governance Pippa Norris identified the American political framework as an extreme anomaly among liberal democracies:\n * "Perhaps the clearest case of overt partisan manipulation of the rules is the United States, where Democrats and Republicans appear automatically on the ballot, but third parties and independents have to overcome a maze of cumbersome legal requirements."\n * Structural state barriers were deliberately constructed to suppress historical third-party and left-wing electoral surges.\n * The structural absence of proportional representation and the enforcement of first-past-the-post rules systematically relegates third parties to the role of election spoilers while depriving them of public campaign subsidies.\n * Tens of millions of unaffiliated, registered independent citizens are barred from casting votes in foundational primary cycles, cementing incumbent protection and freezing outside political competition.\n\n# Intellectual and Spiritual Genealogies of Consensus\n\n* Civic theology and historical consensus concepts:\n * Classical Athens relied on theological faith: citizens accepted the lottery-based allocation of administrative roles because civic deities were believed to guide the outcome of chance.\n * Jean-Jacques Rousseau grounded democratic legitimacy in the natural goodness of human beings, asserting that when untainted by commercial society, citizens gather in assemblies to discern the "general will"—a communal moral consensus transcending private selfishness.\n * Deliberative democratic theory posited that rational, sustained public discourse naturally produces an objective, rational consensus.\n * Psychoanalytic theory contradicts both Rousseauian and deliberative assumptions, demonstrating that the human psyche is torn by repressed desires, unconscious drives, and innate irrationalities that impede self-knowledge and harmonious collective reason.\n\n* Quaker religious roots and modern activist consensus:\n * The secular consensus methodology employed by modern activists traces directly to the Society of Friends (Quakers).\n * Activist scholar L. A. Kauffman historicizes the "theology of consensus" in *Direct Action*:\n * In 1976, the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance ("the Clam") mobilized against a nuclear facility in New Hampshire.\n * Staffers from the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee introduced religious consensus processes into the alliance's organizing manual: "Under consensus, the group takes no action that is not consented to by all group members."\n * Traditional Quaker consensus avoided voting in order to discern the spiritual "sense of the meeting," rooted in shared theological devotion and disciplined, silent contemplation.\n * As consensus drifted into secular activist cultures, the underpinning spiritual quietism was replaced by procedural wrangling and interminable ideological debates.\n * Kauffman criticized the dogmatic adherence to this method: "If the forty-year persistence of consensus has been a matter of faith, surely the time has now come for apostasy. Piety and habit are bad reasons to keep using a process whose benefits are more notional than real."\n\n# Classical Philosophy, State Theory, and Class Antagonism\n\n* Plato's *Republic* vs. Madisonian republics:\n * In *Federalist no. 55*, Madison dismissed direct democracy: "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian Assembly would still have been a mob."\n * In the *Republic*, Plato's Socrates addressed civic conflict by establishing three specialized orders, culminating in philosopher-rulers (which included qualified women, reflecting an unusual degree of intellectual inclusivity for ancient Athens).\n * Plato neutralized factional strife by mandating that rulers be entirely propertyless and indigent, tasked specifically with preventing wealth or poverty from fracturing the polis into warring camps.\n * While Plato proposed abolishing class inequality to eradicate faction, Madison accepted economic stratification as immutable and elected to constrain democratic power instead.\n\n* Thomas Hobbes and the despotic consensus:\n * In the seventeenth century, amidst the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes articulated a pessimistic view of human nature: left to the state of nature, human existence is "nasty, brutish, and short."\n * To escape omnipresent insecurity and mutual violence, individuals consent to transfer their sovereignty to an absolute monarch or assembly (the Leviathan), which enforces public order through coercion.\n * Hobbes defined this enforced consensus as "more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity," requiring the sacrifice of civil liberties for physical security.\n * Modern parallels: The surrender of core constitutional liberties in the aftermath of September 112001, under President George W. Bush in support of an indefinite global "War on Terror."\n\n* Capitalist class war and modern economic disparity:\n * Technocratic liberalism treats the rich-poor divide as a permanent reality to be mitigated through regulated market incentives that preserve capital rights.\n * In 2011, billionaire Warren Buffett explicitly acknowledged systemic conflict: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."\n * In the contemporary United States, the wealthiest top 1\%90\% combined.\n * Historically, working-class advances (e.g., the eight-hour workday in the nineteenth century, living wages) were not granted through deliberative consensus, but won against private mercenaries, Pinkerton agents, and corporate strikebreakers.\n\n# Egalitarian Governance Aboard Early Modern Pirate Vessels\n\n* Institutional organization of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirate ships:\n * In historical accounts documented by Marcus Rediker in *Villains of All Nations* and co-authored with Peter Linebaugh, pirate ships operated as sophisticated, multiracial workplace democracies during an era of autocracy.\n * The crew of Black Sam Bellamy's vessel (1717) was described as a "Mix'd Multitude of all Country's," comprising British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Native American, African American sailors, and approximately two dozen Africans liberated from an intercepted slave ship.\n * The Jolly Roger flag signaled open rebellion against imperial nationalism; when challenged regarding national allegiance, buccaneers declared their nationality as originating "From the seas."\n\n* Democratic checks and structural balances aboard ship:\n * In *Where and When Was Democracy Invented?*, sociologist John Markoff observed that pirate crews established authority rooted directly in the consent of the governed, contrasting sharply with merchant and naval vessels where captains maintained authoritarian command backed by capital punishment.\n * Written ship constitutions ("articles") established regular democratic assemblies, an explicit separation of powers, and equal voting rights for all crew members.\n * Booty was allocated through equitable distribution formulas; captains received only double the share of an ordinary sailor (contrasting sharply with modern corporate CEO compensation ratios reaching 271 times the average worker's wage).\n * Pirate articles created social insurance networks, mandating guaranteed compensation for on-the-job injuries and shared provisions.\n * Dual-mode operational hierarchy: Captains were granted autocratic command *strictly* during active pursuit or naval battle; during routine operations, the captain retained no more authority than a common crewman and remained subordinate to the common council.\n * Captains were regularly deposed by vote for cowardice, abusive cruelty, or acting "too Gentleman-like," reflecting the maxim: "They permit him to be Captain, on Condition, that they may be Captain over him."\n\n# Civil Rights, Suffrage, and the Limits of Majority Consent\n\n* Counter-majoritarian change in American social struggles:\n * Basic rights for marginalized populations were consistently secured against the express will of national majorities.\n * Historical public opinion data demonstrate widespread opposition to civil rights agitation:\n * In contemporaneous polling, 61\% of surveyed Americans disapproved of the Freedom Riders' actions challenging illegal segregation on interstate buses.\n * 74\% of respondents maintained that mass demonstrations and sit-ins actively damaged the civil rights cause.\n * The campaign for women's suffrage was spearheaded by a committed minority, facing massive opposition from both men and large anti-suffrage organizations run primarily by women.\n * Legal civil rights victories were ultimately codified by the counter-majoritarian authority of the Supreme Court through federal court mandates, compelling compliance regardless of local majoritarian resistance.\n\n* Consensus as an instrument of reactionary preservation:\n * John C. Calhoun, seventh U.S. vice president and prominent defender of chattel slavery, championed the "concurrent majority"—a consensus system granting the southern slaveholding minority absolute veto power over federal antislavery laws, premised on the continued disenfranchisement of enslaved people.\n * Article V of the U.S. Constitution creates an undemocratic legislative consensus rule: "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate."\n * This guarantees that any modification to equal Senate representation requires the unanimous consent of all 50 states.\n * Consequently, the 2\%51\%500{,}00040{,}000{,}000).\n\n* Historical applications of the jury veto:\n * Juries in the Anglo-American legal tradition have required unanimous consensus since fourteenth-century England, originally rooted in the metaphysical belief that there existed only one indivisible truth and one unified realm.\n * The consensus mandate provides jurors with the power of "jury nullification"—a structural veto permitting juries to acquit defendants accused under unjust laws.\n * Historically exercised to protect abolitionists defying the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850\text{s}$$ and to subvert prosecutions during Prohibition, though modern jurors are rarely instructed on this prerogative.
Hegemony, Dissensus, and the Necessity of Antagonism
Cultural hegemony and the fabrication of consensus:
Antonio Gramsci conceptualized hegemony as the pervasive cultural habits, norms, and common-sense ideas that render unequal power relationships and social hierarchies invisible and seemingly inevitable.
Tacit consensus frequently operates as an ideological screen, naturalizing systemic domination while suppressing awareness of deep economic and social conflict.
Jacques Rancière and the concept of dissensus:
French philosopher Jacques Rancière defined authentic democracy not as institutional consensus or procedural rule-following, but as dissensus.
Dissensus is the disruptive, unpredictable rupture through which disenfranchised groups shatter established consensual norms, fracturing existing social hierarchies to compel structural reorganization.
The myth of absolute harmony:
Karl Marx envisioned communism as the absolute dissolution of human antagonism: "the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man… the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species."
Even if class warfare were abolished through the common ownership of productive assets, human social organization would retain insoluble conflicts over resource priorities, long-term development choices, civic administration, and interpersonal tensions.
Innate human drives oscillate between immediate gratification and future planning, selfish interest and communal obligation.
Categorical social divisions—such as the "clash of civilizations," patriarchal dominance, racial categorization, and the Madisonian rich-poor divide—are not timeless biological imperatives, but historical, contingent constructs.
Anti-Blackness and white supremacy are modern socio-historical inventions rather than primordial truths; gender relations and norms of sexual fluidity have transformed significantly across brief historical intervals.
Transforming an unjust social order requires abandoning the illusion of easy consensus, embracing democratic conflict and direct contestation against ruling-class resistance.
Dialogues and Consultations
Exchange with David Graeber regarding the viability of consensus in activist contexts:
Question/Challenge: How can absolute consensus be viewed as a workable governance model when it consistently falls prey to procedural paralysis, internal squabbling, and bad-faith disruption?
Response: Consensus possesses direct, practical utility within non-hierarchical, voluntary assemblies. When several dozen organizers plan direct actions, participants lack legal or economic leverage over one another; no one can dock wages or threaten imprisonment to enforce obedience. Under such non-coercive conditions, consensus accurately reflects existing horizontal power dynamics. According to Graeber, consensus rests on two straightforward tenets: "everyone should have equal say (call this 'equality'), and nobody should be compelled to do anything they really don't want to do (call this 'freedom')." The veto mechanism obliges the group to formulate solutions acceptable to all, preserving autonomy and engagement.
Exchange with Professor Omar H. Ali on the American two-party duopoly:
Question/Challenge: What structural foundation supports claims that American elections are "rigged" against true democratic participation?
Response: While rhetoric often frames electoral manipulation through conspiratorial lenses, the two major political parties are private organizations that exploit state authority for institutional self-preservation. In Ali's words: "Those who make the rules, rule." The Democratic and Republican parties construct legal barriers to ensure mutual survival:
"Through structural ways to keep themselves in power, such as closed primaries, ballot-access restrictions, who is included in the presidential debates, the redistricting of congressional lines—all of this stuff is done in a very bipartisan way that benefits either the Democratic or Republican Party. There are all kinds of ways in which it's become normal for the parties to use their offices to advance their partisan interests. Even though they fight like cats and dogs, at the end of the day, they kind of lock arms together to keep themselves in power."
Breaking the stranglehold of this false bipartisan consensus requires opening the political field to independent candidates and outsider movements, actively introducing more conflict and legitimate contestation into American politics.
Exchange with philosopher Cornel West on the efficacy of voting for basic civil rights:
Question/Challenge: What would have occurred historically if key racial justice milestones, such as ending Jim Crow or desegregating public schools, had been submitted to a majoritarian public vote?
Response: "They never would have passed," West asserted directly, noting that authentic school integration remains tragically unfulfilled in contemporary practice. Had civil rights campaigns waited for majoritarian consensus or unanimous accord, segregation would have remained indefinitely codified in law. Social transformation was achieved through sustained, non-consensual struggle and mass disruption undertaken by a determined minority.